Personal Pick(Image credit: Future)In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.Over the past 12 months, I’ve played a total of 32 new games. Not just new to me, but new to market (i.e. they were released in 2025). Admittedly, some of them I only played for a brief while, because I was only doing game performance testing, like Monster Hunter Wilds, but I’ve sunk over 100 hours in others (mostly Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2). But the one game that really stood out for me is the one game that I really shouldn’t like: Grounded 2.Given that I played the first Grounded for around 110 hours, this might seem like a bit of a silly thing to say. I’m certainly not some kind of gaming masochist (though my 2,030 hours in Hearts of Iron 4 would suggest otherwise), so I clearly enjoyed the first game, and thus it’s only logical I would love the sequel.The thing is, I shouldn’t have liked that game, either. It’s not the fundamental genre that I have issues with; in fact, I really like survival crafters. I can’t get enough of them, and my Steam library is full of early access ‘surv-ters’ (I can’t think of a snappy enough single word to use here) that are…
